Aug 3rd, 2017: Jawbone of an…

[xoxoxoBruce]

Of course this is all science fiction because everyone knows the Earth is only 7,000 years old.

Fossils discovered in Morocco are the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, scientists reported on Wednesday, a finding that rewrites the story of mankind’s origins and suggests that our species evolved in multiple locations across the African continent.
“We did not evolve from a single ‘cradle of mankind’ somewhere in East Africa,” said Philipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author of two new studies on the fossils, published in the journal Nature. “We evolved on the African continent.”

Point of order: That we know of. Humanish critters may have developed other places and we haven’t found
any remains yet, or the climates unlike the desert aren’t conducive to fossils surviving.
The only thing we’re sure of is we don’t know.

Until now, the oldest known fossils of our species dated back just 195,000 years. The Moroccan fossils, by contrast, are roughly 300,000 years old. Remarkably, they indicate that early Homo sapiens had faces much like our own, although their brains differed in fundamental ways.
Today, the closest living relatives to Homo sapiens are chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share a common ancestor that lived over six million years ago. After the split from this ancestor, our ancient forebears evolved into many different species, known as hominins.
For millions of years, hominins remained very apelike. They were short, had small brains and could fashion only crude stone tools.

I resemble that remark.

A composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco based on micro computed tomographic scans of multiple original fossils.
Until now, the oldest fossils that clearly belonged to Homo sapiens were discovered in Ethiopia. In 2003, researchers working at a site called Herto discovered a skull estimated to be between 160,000 and 154,000 years old.
A pair of partial skulls from another site, Omo-Kibish, dated to around 195,000 years of age, at the time making these the oldest fossils of our species.
Findings such as these suggested that our species evolved in a small region — perhaps in Ethiopia, or nearby in East Africa. After Homo sapiens arose, researchers believed, the species spread out across the continent.
Only much later — roughly 70,000 years ago — did a small group of
Africans make their way to other continents.

But why just in Africa? Maybe because there's a lot of monkey sex, and it’s yuge.

Since 2004, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues have been working through layers of rocks on a desert hillside at Jebel Irhoud. They have found a wealth of fossils, including skull bones from five individuals who all died around the same time.
Just as important, the scientists discovered flint blades in the same sedimentary layer as the skulls. The people of Jebel Irhoud most likely made them for many purposes, putting some on wooden handles to fashion spears.
Many of the flint blades showed signs of having been burned. The people at Jebel Irhoud probably lit fires to cook food, heating discarded blades buried in the ground below. This accident of history made it possible to use the flints as historical clocks.
Dr. Hublin and his colleagues used a method called thermoluminescence to calculate how much time had passed since the blades were burned. They estimated that the blades were roughly 300,000 years old. The skulls, discovered in the same rock layer, must have been the same age.

If the five died at the same time maybe they lost a fight and their village was burned down cooking the flints?
Bitch poked the fire with my spear and burnt the blade off.

link

[Clodfobble]

Why wouldn't the assumption be that the tip was burned when it was held over the fire to cook the meat? You can't just lay a slab of meat on the flames and expect to get it back out again, and if flint tips were a big deal then it's not like they had an iron skillet.

[Gravdigr]

Didn't Indians Native Americans use fire/heat to shatter flint?